After Life
by Fluffy the Pedestrian Slayer
Summary: Light Yagami finds out what exists after life.
1. Justice

Light Yagami had died.

It wasn't sad, or gruesome, or even relieving. It wasn't anything at all, really. He had just... died.

Sure, Matsuda had shot him quite a bit beforehand, but that was just the last moments of his life. The fact that he had fought to live, used every piece of his logic until the very end didn't make his death itself any more remarkable. Ryuk had always said he would write his name in the Death Note when it was time, but somewhere Light had always believed he could bypass it. That he was above such a thing. He had imagined his death to be something great, and that people would mourn his loss. Not this.

To die from a heart attack, as he had killed so many before him, provoked something akin to shame in Light during that last second. Not for what he had done, but for himself. He had worked so hard and in the end his dream, his vision, his great reign was eventless. It was... humiliating. He thought of L, who would perhaps comment on the irony of it all if he was still alive.

When Light shut his eyes for the last time, he forgot it all. He forgot his appearence, his family, his award-winning intelligence. The Death Note, Ryuk, L, the task force and Misa. Everything was lost apart from the one, overwhelming feeling that he wasn't going to be remembered. 

He was nothing.


	2. Stuff Of Nightmares

Light Yagami could feel.

He could not see, and he could not smell. He didn't know if he could hear or taste, but he could certainly feel. A cold breeze was playing over his skin, which tickled slightly, and his hair was flapping around his ears a little.

There is life after death.

Inwardly, Light rolled his eyes at himself for making quite possibly the most obvious and clichéd assumption that everybody else who happened to be dead made when they got here.

Trouble was, he couldn't exactly determine where 'here' was.

He chuckled in his mind. The great Yagami Light. He'd had so much experience with the supernatural, and yet he couldn't even consider making any remote sense of the afterlife. He tried to think. His mind was still in tact, that was for sure, although much emotion was missing. He couldn't help feeling like he'd forgotten something important.

"Hello, Yagami-kun."

That voice. He recognised that voice.

"I've been waiting here for quite a while now."

With the picture of a pair of almost lidless, black eyes, it all came back. Everything, from realisation of having the ability to move, to the terrifying weight of his complete memory of the Death Note, and being able to recall every detail of the last four years of his life with sickening clarity. He saw himself finding the Death Note. He saw himself nearly throw it back on the ground and leave it alone. He saw himself surrcumb to his own disgustingly human desire for power.

His vision returned.

L had not been speaking through all this, as far as he knew, though it was difficult to tear the present apart from his visions of the past. Light concentrated. He looked at himself. He was wearing plain, all black clothes that hung loosely off him, as if he was in mourning of his own death. This thought sparked off another chain of painful memories. Forcing his own father to his death. Killing the woman who, for a while, he had loved. His own, insignificant, removal from the human world.

Concentrating again, he managed to muffle the visions slightly and observe his surroundings. The sky, if the vague, swirling mass above him could be called such a thing, was a very deep grey, - almost black, but still light enough to show the tangled shades within it, morphing and contracting at an unbearably slow pace in front of his eyes. If tragedy had a design, Light thought, this would surely be it.

The ground was littered with bones; ones of human origin, ones of animal origin, and some that Light didn't even recognise as Earthly. Tall, curved pillars in between the dead and contorted shapes of lightning-struck trees, made of a material Light couldn't name, were leaning towards each other in a vast, snaking line, towards a misty, heartbreakingly black pit which seemed to go on forever in each lateral direction, and of which Light could not see the bottom. A dishevelled and broken staircase appeared to hug the walls of the pit as far as he could tell.

The Shinigami World, Light realised.

L was wearing what Light would have expected him to wear had his mind been on the subject: baggy, plain jeans and a white, long-sleeved t-shirt. Light's view of him was slightly obscured by what appeared to be overly large, black remainders of rotting leaves, jutting out at odd angles from the tree by which he was sitting.

As if he was waiting for Light to overcome all this before he next spoke, L remained completely silent as he walked closer to him. In a small moment of horror, Light realised that the skeletal, lace-like obstructions to his view of L were not leaves. They were wings.

It was like they had been stabbed awkwardly into his back. Blood stained his shirt where they passed through the fabric, and some swelling could be seen at the base of each one. Light felt sick, not unlike how a person would feel if they saw a friend's bones broken at some horrific angle. As he got closer, other new details on L's body came into focus. His fingernails had grown longer by about an inch, and they were black and shattered. Thorn-like black spines emerged from the far side of each of his hands, and the same on his feet. His hair looked thick and oily, and splatters of stale blood were on every section of exposed skin Light could see.

That wasn't the worst of it. He moved closer, enough to be able to sit beside him and talk to him, and saw that the wings and spines and hair weren't just growing out of L. They were growing into the charred tree beside him, and into the earth between the bones. L was _growing_ into this landscape. He was _literally attached_ to it.

Light was ready to either scream, vomit or get up and run, when L spoke.

"I apologise for my current appearence, Yagami-kun. However it seems the longer one stays still in this world, the more one becomes a part of it."


	3. Existentialism

Sorry for the blatant lack of updates and thanks for all the kind words, folks. :)

Now I'm a little paranoid about getting worse. Take this chapter for example. Apologies; I made up a few worlds.

-

Light Yagami was curious.

The moment L had spoken, the horror, disgust, and, dare he admit it, fear, were replaced with an insatiable urge to know more, and to understand this new situation.

L answered this, and carried on talking.

"Apparently this is why the Shinigami are so bored. They sit still for too long and then cannot find the motivation to untangle themselves from the ground. It really is quite a terrible existence."

Light did not speak, and L continued.

"I have no doubt that by now, you have realised that you are both dead and in the realm of the Shinigami. I expect that sooner rather than later, you are going to come to the realisation that I am not supposed to be here. I was not intended to take this path and become a Death God."

Light smirked at himself for not thinking of this any earlier. He had been so distracted by... everything.

"Thus you will be wanting to know why I am here."

The lack of response that followed evidently signified agreement.

"There are dimensions of the afterlife; Heaven, Hell, the colour world and the elemental world. The Shinigami Realm runs parallel to these dimensions, and Earth is in the middle. Since you killed me, I have visited each of these worlds several times. I have discovered that every time somebody enters one, they are given a time limit before they become an inhabitant of that world; before they cannot leave. Most people who can choose to become an inhabitant of Heaven, since it is, as expected, the ultimate paradise of anyone who enters. Unfortunately, many people who die are not permitted to choose the path they take. Several people, for example, are commonly regarded as evil, and are trapped in Hell, suffering their death over and over again for eternity."

Light wondered what this would be like, and realised he was becoming jealous of L for having visited and figured out all these worlds.

"At the moment though, Yagami-kun, I believe you are being dealt a worse hand than Hell."

The breeze picked up once more, chilling Light to the bone. The clothes he was wearing didn't seem to make much of a difference, and he felt the air drift through the fabric as if it wasn't there at all. He still couldn't look at L properly.

"The Shinigami Realm was made to contain the power that Death Gods possess. It was created to be just as overwhelming and terrifying as the ability to kill that it exists because of. Every part of the world is terrible and frightening; once inside, most people are trapped, because it feeds from the worst memories and parts of ourselves being brought to the front of the mind, and the lack of hope that subsequently follows. Many are tricked into coming here, and never return. You, Yagami-kun, are trapped here, rather than Hell."

_'Don't think that anyone who uses the Death Note can go to Heaven or Hell...'_

The memory of when he first met Ryuk came to Light; how he didn't care. How he had dismissed this piece of information as if it was a joke.

"By using the Death Note, you have more or less sealed your own fate of becoming one of the Shinigami. The process has already begun. Look at your feet."

Light looked down from where he had been standing on the spot and saw that the flats and sides of his feet were becoming cracked and wrinkled. He lifted one foot to survey this more, and found that painful roots of black, like threads, tied him to the ground. Pacing a little, he pulled himself free, wondering how L could have seen this without facing him.

"You cannot touch anything in this world, Yagami-kun," L continued, "without becoming attached to it. You have a duty here to kill, so as to guarantee the continuation of your own existence. But I'm sure you'll have little problem with that."

At this accusatory statement, L turned to face Light. His eyes were darker than Light remembered, and his face was sunken, dark eyes standing out from ghostly pale skin. He was grimacing, and simply turning his head appeared to be causing him pain.

"I have been here for two weeks, waiting for you to arrive. As you can see, it's had something of a profound effect on my physical state."

Light finally spoke.


	4. Only Human

Thanks for the kind words, hopefully I'll come up with some good ideas so I can actually finish this. :)  
This chapter and the next are going to be a tad short, so be warned.

* * *

Light Yagami finally spoke.

"Why?"

He said it as if it was most obvious and the most undeterminable thing in the world simulataneously.

"Because I want to help you." L said in the same tone of voice. Light was amazed. After all he'd done...

Come to think of it, he wasn't really that surpised at all. If there was one person at all who would be capable of the forgiveness of his wrongdoings, he really did believe it would be L.

"How?"

"The rules of the Death Note state that humans who use it cannot go to Heaven or Hell once they die. However, nothing is said regarding the other three worlds; Colour, Elemental, and Earth."

"Earth?"

"Yes. Deceased souls who choose to inhabit the Human World become a very different kind of being than a person. They become very ephemeral, almost always invisible. They watch what is happening to Earth as an outsider. A ghost. I used that world to watch you occasionally, and when I saw that you were near death I came here."

Light was confused. This didn't add up.

"That didn't take two weeks."

"Time flows at a different speed in this world. During the time it has taken us to have this conversation, about three seconds have passed since your death on Earth."

More silence, then L spoke once more.

"I have spoken to several Shinigami, most of whom, like your old friend Ryuk, have refused to tell me very much. The older a Shinigami gets - the more it stays here, the more its mind is deformed, along with its body. Some of the younger Shinigami, only one or two decades 'old', however, have shared some information with me. They found that once transported here, they could not go to any other world than this one. In fact, they only knew of the other worlds because of stories, and wandering spirits from the other worlds. There are tales of Shinigami who have disappeared, and so I intend to help you do the same."

"Wh-" Light started, but L cut him off.

"I'm afraid I have spent much too long talking. My freedom to leave this world is almost up, and yours is getting close, since you, being confined to this world, have a shorter amount of time until you are fully inhabited in this world."

"How long?"

"About ten minutes."


	5. Lucidity

Shorter chapters deserve quicker updates. The next one'll be nice and long, I assure you. Thanks for the favourites/alerts/reviews as always. :)

* * *

"What?!"

Light was shocked. He'd barely been here half an hour, but he was already only ten minutes away from becoming a full-time Shinigami?

"Please just listen, and do exactly as I say. Hopefully we can make it in time. Help me up." L said, struggling against the roots holding him down in all directions. Light grabbed his arm and pulled.

L let out an agonising scream of pain as black threads ripped out of his skin. Seeing the usually calm and collected L like this frightened Light, and he began to panic. He tried to get go of his arm, but two newly sprung threads were keeping them together. They both winced as they pulled apart, creating new wounds.

"I have to visit another world briefly to restore my time limit here. I will be right back."

L closed his eyes.

"Wait!" Light started, but L's form had already split into thousands of pieces, he had to simply watch as he evaporated into the stale air of the Shinigami Realm.

He finally lost it and screamed. He was truly alone. He turned and tried to take a step, but his feet were tied down once again. Screaming again, Light ripped at the threads holding his now unrecognisable feet to the floor. He fell to the ground in agony as he felt something emerge from his spine. Blindly reaching for whatever it was, his hands clasped onto three large spikes, made from something that felt like wrought iron, protruding grotesquely from the bottom of his spine. Light couldn't breathe. He choked and wretched.

"Yagami-kun."

Light breathed, thankful. L had returned.

"I told you I would be right back. If this mission is going to work, you are going to have to trust me."

How could he be so placid?

He looked at the detective. He looked just as he had done when he was alive, except somehow brighter. His image looked sharp and more defined, and he was glowing, like the black, white and blue of his usual appearence were made up of a million different shades each. Light could only stare in awe.

"What?" L asked, before noticing. "Oh, yes. Remnants of the Colour World. You'd like it there. Everything has a sort of peace to it. All you can notice is the way things look. Problems sort of seem unimportant..."

"What are we going to do?" Light asked, impatiently, feeling other spikes under his skin that wanted to surface.

"We? We are going to do nothing, Yagami-kun." L explained. "_You _are going to present yourself to the ruler of the Shinigami, and _you_ are going to argue your case. _I_ am going to tell you what to do."

Great, thought Light. Less than eight minutes of freedom left, and I've got to argue with the ruler of the Shinigami.


	6. All Roads

Yesyes, I promised a longer chapter. Fear not, the second part of this will be up tomorrow; I just thought the ending was good on this one. Thanks again for all the kind words. :)

* * *

Light Yagami had always known the answer. He always held up his hand first in class, always the first to interject his opinion in his university lectures, always the first with to come up with a new theory on the Kira case. Admittedly, the latter involved something of an unfair advantage, but Light could always offer a reasoned, sensible, and completely unsuspecting answer. All his life. If he didn't know, he wouldn't stop looking until he did.

But right now, Light Yagami didn't know any answers. More importantly, he didn't feel any remote urge to look for them. He was stumbling in the dark. Quite literally.

"Yagami-kun, I am well aware of the amount of physical pain you must be going through right now, but with your free time rapidly decreasing I suggest you attempt to focus on the task at hand."

L shuddered visibly as his hair grew slightly and became thick with grease, the thorn-like embellishments that Light had last seen on his hands and feet now protruding from his neck. He walked slightly ahead of Light, not slowing his pace in the slightest as he turned to face him, the sunken black eyes and mass of hair almost camouflaged against the darkest parts of the swirling charcoal sky above them.

Light ignored him, largely because another iron-like spike had just emerged from the middle of his back. Another hurried inspection told him that they had reached nearly halfway up his spine. Not bearing to touch or look at them for much longer, Light attempted to walk in a straight line rather than think about it.

This, however, was becoming more difficult, with each new addition to his anatomy creating a weight strong enough to drag one vertebra down until it made firm friends with the next. So much of a distraction was this that Light barely noticed when the unlikely pair left the row of deadened trees and walked out into open ground.

"Not far now." L sounded bleak.

Light took a glance upwards and found himself unable to look away. The gaping hole in the Shinigami World dropped sickeningly into miles, continents, dimensions that he wasn't sure it was possible to drop into, and along its edge, great cracks escaped and ran like lightning bolts as far as the eye could see.

Ten, maybe twenty of these colossal fault lines, the foremost of which ran past Light and L's right hand side, were either spat from the endless, black vortex in front of him or gathering toward it, depending on which way they looked. Light quickly decided he just about preferred the latter and, fortunately, turning to talk to L allowed him this perspective.

"Do you have a plan yet?" He asked quietly, still feeling both shocked at his surroundings and slightly undeserving of such a plan, should there be one.

"I have two possible options, probably about to become one." He started calculating with his fingers, but promptly stopped as the muscles of his left tightened, straightening his fingers excruciatingly as more thorns reappeared.

"I thought for a long time about how Death Note users are kept tabs on, and if it were possible to fool a Death Note into thinking you weren't the user; or at least not intentionally. That way you could simply claim you were forced into using it and so did not deserve the same fate as a willing candidate."

Light listened, but kept his head down so as to keep his mind away from the blistering sensation of another of those wretched spikes about to reveal itself.

"Unfortunately, all possible conclusions seem to point to that plan not working. However effective our combined intellect, I doubt we would be able to pass such a story off. Right, Ryuk?"

"_Hyuk-hyuk, lie to the king? Cheat the lord of death himself? It'd be fun to watch you try, that's for sure. Nobody's ever tried it, so far as I can remember."_

Ryuk's grating, heavy voice boomed from somewhere above them, and Light squinted upwards to see a familiar pinned, toothy grin. Ryuk, obviously rather amused with his current predicament, seemed to smile more widely, and waved with enthusiasm.

"_Hello, Light. How's Life? Or should I say, how's death?"_

"Ryuk," Light managed, "how long have you been following?"

"_About four years, on and off. Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk!"_


	7. A Hope In Hell

Part two of the promised longer chapter. Come on, what do I pay you people for? Review!  
Maybe you're all just a wee bit shy. Well, thanks for all the favourites and alerts anyway. ;)

* * *

Once again, Light chose to ignore his current company. Wresting between the hope of getting out of this place and the insufferable urge to drop to the floor and give in, he certainly wasn't in the mood for Ryuk's twisted sense of humour.

Suddenly, L cut across the silence.

"Plan number two, it seems, it our only option." It was wearier than his usual calmly tired voice; normally one of reason but now sounding as though it was a great effort to speak, though whether this was due to his similarly painful experience of spending time in the Shinigami World or to his distaste for 'plan number two', Light could not reasonably tell. He expected only the worst.

"Plan number two? What's that?"

"Argue."

Light nodded matter-of-factly.

"Right. Okay then."

Now sensing sharp pains in both elbows that he suspected he was going to find even more unpleasant in a few seconds, Light focused on the pattern of his feet. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left. Over and over again.

"It feels like we've been walking for years."

"_Time is different here Light, remember?_" interjected Ryuk, still upside down and moving to float just in front of him. The clearly highly amused Shinigami lengthened the 'i' sound in his name in such a way that, combined with the view of the cracked earth and abysmal deep before him, Light felt like he was the one who was the wrong way up, about to drop from the face of this place into eternity.

Struggling to keep upright, he decided to focus himself on more pressing matters.

"You really think this is going to work?" Light asked, directing a concerned look towards L, who evidently wasn't so interested in what should happen if they failed, since he kept walking straight ahead without so much as a glance at his former friend and colleague.

"I think there is a chance, yes."

"A chance?" Light winced, spikes now beginning to rupture from his upper arms too. "What kind of chance?"

"At the present moment I'm estimating roughly 17 percent."

For a split second, Light began to roll his eyes. The giving of an estimated percentage was something so laughably typical of L that it temporarily distracted him from what he had actually said.

"What?!"

"Yagami-kun, consider the alternative; that I hadn't come to the Shinigami World, risking my own future in the process, and hadn't explained to you in a matter of minutes what I have spent years attempting to understand; so guaranteeing your fate to remain, irreversibly, a Death God."

Light was silenced at that. Although his tone had been far from malicious, it was plain that there was to be no argument with L's plan of action, so from then on Light kept quiet.

Inwardly, however, Light enjoyed a satisfying realisation that he had taken so much information clearly on board in such a short amount of time. If L had also given him credit for this, he certainly did not say as much.

They walked on.


	8. Descent

Good grief. I sincerely apologise for the lack of updates. The good news is, I've bullied myself into finishing this. It will be done! And soon! I just needed to make sure that I wasn't becoming too repetetive with all this depressing description of Shinigamiland. :P

Thanks, as always, for all the kind words and favourites.

* * *

For a second, Light Yagami remembered what death was like.

After what seemed like forever, the unlikely gathering of the living dead had reached where they wanted to be. The gaping black pit stretched before them dizzyingly; some long forgotten distance enticing anyone who came near to throw themselves into its depths, and for that moment, Light wondered why on Earth anyone would _want_ to be here. They had stopped only for a moment at the top of the winding staircase which was to be their next path, but Light could already feel his feet beginning to tangle themselves into the ground beneath him. Making the mistake of looking down, he saw what was left of them; two crusted, peeling, feet-shaped slabs which looked as though they were made from some sort of surreal concrete. Beyond that was just darkness, and the more he looked at it, the more he seemed to feel the threads holding him to the Shinigami World shift, as though pulling him further towards its edge.

He took a brief glance at L, who, naturally, was giving the new surroundings an intrigued and calculating inspection without much of a care for the wings that had once again implanted themselves grotesquely into his back.

Behind them both, Ryuk was upright again, bobbing up and down as if to a beat, which Light could tell was the Shinigami version of somewhere between excitement and glee.

Everywhere he looked there were charred rocks, remains, things that were once trees, and, of course, the pit and its tributaries; those terrifying cracks nearly twice the size of any images of earthquakes he had seen while he was alive. But Light was starting to care less and less about all this. Everything here was dead; even the ground itself. More than afraid of it, he was sick of it. The very sight of it in every direction repulsed him, and all he wanted was to be rid of it.

His right foot moved more easily than he had expected it to.

Light wobbled, trying to regain his balance. He wasn't falling, but wasn't quite stable either; an in between situation that fit the Shinigami World perfectly. Suddenly, feeling an excruciating tug on his right shoulder like it was being dislocated, he managed to step backwards. He took a breath.

Dust, or an equivalent substance that seemed to be hanging in the air, had been disrupted around him, and he felt it grate in his throat as though he was wandering a desert, which was disconcerting combined with the – Light excused himself for the pun – deathly chill of this world.

The only place on his body he could feel remote warmth was his shoulder, now recovering from the pain of whatever foul piece of metal or bone had just made its appearance known. Light exhaled, and did a double take as he realised.

It was a hand.

Light turned to face L, scolding himself for how much his skills of perception had diminished in the little time that he'd been here. But why had he saved him from the fall? Surely, being dead already, it wouldn't have caused too much of a problem, and, indeed, even so, the detective's own dilemma would have solved almost instantaneously. With eyes as wide as ever, L simply nodded to him once, and, with some effort, dislodged his hand from Light's shoulder.

He wasn't entirely sure of what to say. Had he just saved him from some nasty experience beyond death? As much as Light had started to get used to the fact that L wanted to help get him out of this place, he still found it difficult to believe that anybody would want to spare him from any possibly painful accidents along the way.

Before Light could organise his thoughts enough to ask, L turned for the staircase and began his descent, and he was forced, for now, to accept it was another astonishing example of the detective's eerily peaceful demeanour. Putting his own foot to the first step, he begrudgingly followed.

As it turned out, the endless staircase was not endless. Its conclusion hovered just a few hundred metres from where they had stepped onto it.  
It did not take a genius to realise that the landscape had changed. Chains, wooden beams, chunks of what were once large statues and cogs stuck out from the dirt and rock strata of the walls; a collection of remnants from past ages of Earth. The temperature was increasing despite the bitter wind, and, more importantly, Light's perceptions of distance and time were returning. The steps were decisively stone, and the further down Light and L walked, there less their feet clung to them. Light felt the spikes in his back and arms peel, crack and disintegrate. About fifty metres from the end of the stairs, L's wings fell off, dropping into the black abyss their path was suspended above. They were reverting to their human forms.

As L stretched a little, relishing the freedom his back had suddenly gained, Light watched as the remains of his own anatomical additions followed his companion's into the gaping hole beneath their feet.

He started to wonder if he'd preferred the staircase as endless.


End file.
